Negotiating Motherhood in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Mary McCartin Wearn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781135860875
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

Returning to a foundational moment in the history of the American family, Negotiating Motherhood in Nineteenth-Century American Literature explores how various authors of the period represented the maternal role – an office that came to a new, social prominence at the end of the eighteenth century. By examining maternal figures in the works of diverse authors such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and Sarah Piatt, this book exposes the contentious but fruitful negotiations that took place in the heart of the American sentimental era – negotiations about the cultural meanings of family, womanhood, and motherhood. This book, then, challenges critical constructions that figure American sentimentalism as a coherent, monolithic project, tied strictly to the forces of cultural conservatism. Furthermore, by exploring nineteenth-century challenges to conventional maternal ideology and by exposing gaps in the mythology of "ideal" motherhood, Negotiating Motherhood demonstrates that the icon of an American Madonna – a figure that still haunts America's imagination – never had an uncontested reign. Transcending the boundaries of literary criticism, this work will be useful to feminist scholars and to those who are interested in the history of women's culture, the American mythology of family life, or the cultural construction of motherhood.

Chapter One

“Stronger Than All Was Maternal Love”: Maternal Idealism in Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Harriet Beecher Stowe was no “typical” nineteenth-century mother, even when measured exclusively against her white, Northern, middle-class peers. Having garnered the finest, most progressive education available to a young woman of her day, she spent the bulk of her married life—not simply as maternal guardian of her domestic enclave—but also as the primary breadwinner for her family in a very public literary arena. As the mother of seven children and arguably the most successful American woman writer of the nineteenth century, Stowe struggled valiantly but often in vain to strike a sustainable balance between her fertility and creativity, between her professional and domestic duties.

Stowe’s strategies for cutting a thriving professional career from the fabric of her essentially domestic nineteenth-century existence included a demand that Virginia Woolf would echo more than eighty-five years later: “If I am to write,” Stowe reasoned in a letter to her husband Calvin, “I must have a room to myself, which shall be my room” (Charles Stowe, Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe 104). Stowe had a modern sensibility about motherhood that flew in the face of a conventional nineteenth-century wisdom that warned Northern women not to “trust” their “treasures too much to the charge of hirelings” (Sigourney, Letters to Mothers 31). Intuiting that buying time and space for herself would make her both a better writer and mother, Stowe refused, in her own words, to be a “mere domestic slave” and used her literary wages to employ a series of serving-women to act as wet-nurses, perform household labor, and care for her growing children (qtd. In Hedrick 119). In a letter to her friend Mary Dutton, Stowe claimed that her “house affairs & . . . children” were “in better keeping” when she herself was relieved by hired help and not “shut up in [the] nursery” (qtd. in Hedrick 119). Stowe also replenished her energies, and, no doubt, attempted to restrict family size by traveling widely as a young wife, spending extended periods of time away from husband and children while visiting her geographically dispersed extended family, attending to business in the literary capitals of the nineteenth century, and searching for health in the new-age spas of her day. During one prolonged visit to her brother Henry’s family in Indianapolis, she gleefully claimed in a letter to her husband Calvin, “I have forgotten almost the faces of my children—all the perplexing details of home, and almost that I am a married woman” (qtd. In Hedrick 161).

While the unconventional family life that Stowe built upon her literary talents set her apart from many of her peers, she was not immune to the psychological and spiritual demands of the nineteenth-century institution of motherhood. Although she manipulated her domestic environment to control her writing life, she was often plagued by guilt for her failure to live up to her culture’s maternal ideals. In a letter to her husband, she fretted that her growing children needed “a mother’s whole attention” and pondered whether she could “lawfully divide” her energies between her family and her “literary efforts” (Charles Stowe, Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe 104). A notoriously poor domestic manager, Stowe found her inability to effectively orchestrate her family’s material life an eternal bone of contention between her husband and herself. However, she particularly bristled at the affective demands of nineteenth-century motherhood: “[It] drinks up all my strength to care for & provide for all this family,” she protested to Calvin, “to try to cure the faults of all—harmonize all—alas it is too much for me and my aching head and heart often show it” (qtd. in Hedrick 146). If Stowe measured her success as a mother by her children’s tendency to thrive and flourish, she likely suffered disappointment, guilt, and frustration. Only three of her children would outlive her; two of the seven struggled with addiction, and the most vulnerable—Fred—disappeared as a young adult, never to be heard from again. Plagued by moments of deep maternal ambivalence and despair, Stowe was, at times, remarkably unsentimental in assessing her own maternal experience. In a letter to Calvin she wrote, “Ah how little comfort had I in being a mother—how was all that I proposed met & crossed & my ways ever hedged up!” (qtd. in Hedrick 196–197).

Given Stowe’s unconventional relationship to the domestic norms of her culture—her status as working mother, her acknowledged domestic failings, and her consciously articulated maternal ambivalence—she seems an unlikely candidate to become, as Joan Hedrick contends she does, one of the nineteenth century’s “chief propagandists for the Victorian ideology of the home” (127). Undeniably, however, no American novel more fully exploits or aggressively propagates sentimental maternity than Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Built on the backs of strong mother figures, Stowe’s novel deploys what Jane Tompkins identifies as American culture’s “favorite story about itself,” “the story of salvation through motherly love” (125). Indeed, the abolitionist argument in Uncle Tom’s Cabin runs on a uniquely maternal economy, fueled by the power of domestic propriety, selfless maternal love, and affective influence. And so, while Stowe found it impossible to “harmonize all” in her own family life, in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, she figures mothers as the very arbiters of peace for a national family divided by race, regionalism, and slavery. Social change in Stowe’s fictional world is modeled on the power of maternal influence as imagined in nineteenth-century sentimental culture—as the power of moral affect. “But what can any individual do?” Stowe rhetorically asks her audience in the concluding remarks of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. “There is one thing every individual can do,” she answers, “they can see to it that they feel right” (385). When the abolitionist Stowe urges her readers to political action—to change the world by “see[ing]” to their “sympathies,” she is calling on citizens to feel with the heart of a mother (385).

As the Douglas-Tompkins debate so aptly illustrates, Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a critical lightening rod for widely diverse readings, precisely because of the text’s own compelling complexities and contradictions. Specifically, Uncle Tom’s Cabin articulates a utopian maternal feminism, inscribed within oppressive, patriarchal social structures. The good mother figures in Stowe’s novel, from Eliza Harris to Mrs. Shelby to Rachel Haliday, paradoxically underwrite feminine acts of civil disobedience from within the confines of domesticity and through a culturally endorsed discipline of self-denial. In Stowe’s imagined nation, as this study will show, mothers are model citizens whose a priori moral knowledge (some might call it “maternal instinct”) and disinterested care for the vulnerable other is ultimately privileged over the obligations of existing social contracts and even the law. While the repressive elements of sentimental motherhood remain in full force in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the good women in the novel successfully resist social and legal policy that violates their maternal sensibilities. Stowe’s maternal politics are thus reactionary and revolutionary at once. Following the destinies of mothers in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, one paradoxically finds feminine self-abnegation as a means of political power and disinterested motherhood as a colonizing force of social justice.

Given Stowe’s exploitation of a maternal idealism that flew in the face of her lived experience, it is impossible to determine the precise mixture of ideology and efficacy in Uncle Tom’s Cabin—to quantify just how much of Stowe’s maternal discourse is zealous, utopic vision and how much is rhetorical pragmatism. Elizabeth Ammons argues for Stowe’s “deep intellectual commitment to nineteenth-century maternal ideology” (158), and claims that Stowe was prefiguring “the maternal paradise America might be” through Uncle Tom’s Cabin (168). However, Stowe’s deployment of sentimental maternity is undoubtedly a savvy invocation of ethos, too— one, as Marianne Noble suggests, that was “a tool of political agency” (127). Indeed, as an antebellum woman writer, Stowe’s only claim to authority and her only means of establishing cultural credibility is via the role of motherhood. Furthermore, as a Northern abolitionist attempting to gain political sway over an audience of white, female, middle class readers, Stowe shrewdly appeals to a shared maternal sensibility. Most importantly, though, Stowe’s canny exploitation of the disciplinary functions of the institution of motherhood in Uncle Tom’s Cabin suggests that Stowe consciously recognized, without critically judging, how women are regulated through the maternal role. In fact, as this study shows, Stowe not only dramatizes how women are socially hailed to proper motherhood, but she also rhetorically employs the mechanisms of maternal discipline to conjure a desired political response.

Studying Stowe, then, is a necessary first step in any analysis of the nineteenth-century maternal, precisely because she so elegantly exposes both the power and the limits of sentimental motherhood. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in fact, represents a cultural baseline of sorts, a sentimental, maternal paradigm, against which other authors of the era can be measured. While many of her contemporaries would promulgate the particular brand of mother-power found in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, others, as we shall see, challenge Stowe’s essentialist, feminine sentimentalism. In figuring the selfless and self-sacrificing mother as a peace-broker between contending factions, as a force that naturally “mediated between opposing natures,” Stowe imagines a sentimental solution to the contentious and contrary needs of a diverse American culture (My Wife and I 37). While her solution places motherhood at the center of the national project, her maneuvers come at great cost in terms of imagining female subjectivity and individual agency. Through the fiction of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and her real-life role as an abolitionist activist and author, Stowe exposes the double-edged authority of the maternal: its paradoxical power to both liberate and entrap.

MOTHER-POWER: AN AGENCY FOR OTHERS

In Stowe’s antebellum culture, the institution of motherhood offered white, middle-class women increasing prestige and a legitimate, if limited, cultural voice. While the ideals of feminine virtue created a platform of moral authority and gave women “access,” in Gillian Brown’s words, “to critical, subversive stances,” those same ideals also defined the shape and scope of women’s political engagement (28). In fact, the acceptable limits of women’s politics were inscribed, in part, by cultural conceptions that figured the practice of motherhood as a discipline of self-denial. With a maternal love based in Sigourney’s words, on its object’s “utter helplessness,”—a love that could “subsist without aliment”—the ideal mother ineluctably subordinated her own needs to those of her child (Letters to Mothers 47). This ethos of maternal self-abnegation, likewise, underwrote and defined women’s politics before the Civil War. For while female public discourse on behalf of self or one’s own group might be deemed unseemly, the maternal moral code and the limits of domestic propriety warranted women’s public, political action on behalf of others. In fact, publicly advocating for the vulnerable and disenfranchised other, a phenomenon that Rosemarie Garland Thomson dubs “benevolent maternalism,” was viewed as a natural extension of women’s motherly impulse.¹ Women’s charitable and political support of social reform movements that advocated for marginalized groups such as Native Americans and the working poor were, in this sense, part and parcel of a maternal ethics that granted women in the North a narrow but significant political agency and offered them an opportunity to help shape the burgeoning nation.

For Stowe and her female contemporaries, the abolitionist movement provided a particularly powerful venue to test their political clout, since that “patriarchal institution” was figured by both North and South as an essentially moral and domestic issue, concerning both the individual and national family. By advocating for the slave, who was often depicted as a child, women like Stowe articulated a radical, progressive social agenda and, at the same time, fortified the self-denying, domestic construction of motherhood on which their tenuous cultural authority relied. According to historian Mary P. Ryan, furthermore, abolitionists early adopted a “sentimental anti-slavery formula,” which resonated with traditional feminine concerns by identifying the destruction of family life as the defining sin of the slave state (131). Increasingly reliant on a domestic discourse, abolitionists converted “mundane apprehensions” about family disruption into “sympathy for the slave” (131–132). Stowe, in fact, claimed that it was her own personal experience of maternal loss via the death of her young son Charlie that awakened her abolitionist consciousness and led to the production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin: “It was at [Charlie’s] dying bed and at his grave that I learnt what a poor slave mother may feel when her child is torn away from her’” (Charles Stowe, Harriet Beecher Stowe 154).

If, then, as Philip Fisher has contended, slavery was the “fated, primary subject” of sentimentality (101), the sentimental mother seems the destined emotional fulcrum of abolitionist reform. Indeed, the beleaguered slave mother becomes, for Stowe, the central icon of the South’s ills and the central subject with which she hopes to garner her readers’ sympathy. Stowe specifically grounds her sentimental narrative and elaborates her maternal ethics through the character of Eliza Harris, echoing and amplifying the wages of mother-power that she would grapple with in her own role as abolitionist activist. Just as Stowe’s authority as a writer and citizen is built on an essentially Christian, maternal ethos, so too does she establish the African-American slave woman as an appropriate object of sympathy. Contradicting a vision of black womanhood that imagined female slaves merely as a means of production in the slave-holding south, Stowe endows Eliza with the natural instincts of motherhood, characteristics at the time deemed “white,” even in the North. Through Eliza’s motherhood, Stowe fulfills the sentimental mission that Philip Fisher has identified, extending “full and complete humanity” to the slave woman (99).

A character whose iconographic status makes her the centerpiece of a chapter simply entitled “The Mother,” Eliza Harris, more than any white, female character in the novel, exemplifies ideal maternal ethics in its primary form—in the intimate relationship between mother and child. “[T]ranquilized and settled” by her motherhood (12), Eliza is taught “the duties of the family” and the responsibilities of a “Christian mother” by her mistress, and she lives quite contentedly in the domestic space allotted to her in the Shelby home as long as her family is intact (29). Stowe makes clear, however, that Eliza’s maternal sensibility is not just learned; it is an inherent part of the black woman’s character, a heavenly quality that transcends the maternal tutoring offered by her white mistress. So ideal, in fact, is Eliza’s motherhood that Stowe links her to the Virgin Mary, the embodiment of divine maternity. Echoing the words of the prophet Simeon to the Virgin (Luke 2: 35), Eliza’s husband George warns that “a sword will pierce through” her “soul” (15).

Just as Stowe’s maternal posture authorizes her to breach the boundaries of the domestic sphere and enter into public, abolitionist dialogue, so too does Eliza Harris’s domestic propriety and maternal correctness authorize her unlawful escape from slavery. To highlight the specifically maternal ethics of Eliza’s flight, Stowe juxtaposes the slave woman with her husband George, who flees bondage in advance of his wife. George Harris is an Emersonian hero of sorts—a Frederick Douglass figure who privileges freedom over domestic ties and who demonstrates, in Richard Yarborough’s words, a “rational, violently male rejection of slavery” (“Strategies of Black Characterization” 56). While George is angered over his master’s attempts to separate him from his wife, he views the affront as just the last in a line of transgressions—not against his family—but against his manhood. Before George’s flight, Eliza urges her husband to “be patient,” and reminds him that the offending party is, after all, his “master.” George bitterly rejects the paternalistic relationship: “My master! and who made him my master? That’s what I think of—what right has he to me? I’m as much a man as he is. I’m a better man than he is” (13). While George hopes to be reunited with his wife after escaping to the free North, he has no qualms about severing his family bonds in order to attain freedom. After taking flight, he vows, “if any man tries to stop me, let him take care, for I am desperate. I’ll fight for my liberty to the last breath” (97). Willing to risk the permanent abandonment of his family, George will battle to the death before compromising his manhood and relinquishing his personal freedom again. The masculine motivation that Stowe offers for George’s escape serves to throw his wife’s drive to freedom into sharp relief.

Eliza runs neither to assert her selfhood nor for the sake of personal freedom. Just as Stowe’s imaginatively formulates her subversive publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a motherly means of preserving national union, so too Eliza’s illegal escape is figured as a selfless, maternal effort to maintain the integrity of familial bonds. When the mother learns that she is to be separated from her child Harry, who is to be “sold down the river,” Eliza is compelled to politically radical action—to flee with her son from the safe, domestic world of the Shelby home. While she personally dreads “leaving the only home she had ever known, and cutting loose from the protection of a friend whom she loved and revered,” maternal instinct trumps both her loyalties to the Shelbys and her attachment to their domestic world (43). As Uncle Tom reports, it simply “—‘t an’t in natur” for the mother to sit idly by while her child is sold” (34). In the hastily scribbled note Eliza leaves for her mistress when departing, she expresses confidence that she will be exonerated for her crime because she is acting selflessly on behalf of her child: “[D]ear Misses! Don’t think me ungrateful . . . I am going to try to save my boy—you will not blame me!” (31). While maternal instinct, thus, radicalizes Eliza and authorizes her to transgress the bonds of that patriarchal institution of slavery, it also defines the limits of her aspirations; when she flees with her son across the icy Ohio, she does so not for the sake of personal freedom, but to save her child and maintain the integrity of her family. When the slave-Madonna eventually succeeds in achieving freedom for her son and for herself, the gain is no willful assertion of selfhood on Eliza’s part, but a reaffirmation of the inherent morality of maternal dictates and the primacy of the bonds of kin. In the end, the integrity of the Harris family is preserved through a stoic, motherly sacrifice, proving, in Stowe’s words, that “stronger than all was maternal love” (43).

Requiring selflessness and sacrifice from women to maintain domestic union, is Stowe’s mother-power, then, merely a “continuation of male hegemony in different guises,” (as Ann Douglas contends 13)? Some contemporary critics have argued otherwise. Building on the work of early feminist critics, Gillian Brown and Rosemarie Garland Thomson suggest that Stowe consciously recognized the limits of a domesticity inscribed within patriarchy and attempted to circumvent those limits. Brown argues, for example, that Stowe conducts a “utopian rehabilitation” of the sentimental in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and actually reforms the “domestic values” that were complicit with a masculine, market economy (18). While Brown admits that “feminine self-abnegation” is the core of mother power in the novel, she concludes that in creating models of civil disobedience such as Eliza, Stowe imagines a world in which “domestic self-denial and feminist self-seeking can be complementary modes” (28). Rosemarie Garland Thomson likewise argues that Stowe specifically envisions “maternal devotion” as a type of “personal empowerment” (Thomson 86) that allows women to escape domestic limitations and to construct a uniquely “feminine” version of the Emersonian “liberal identity” (88).

Stowe’s radical vision indeed offers a new agency to women. I would argue, however, that the particularly maternal shape of this feminine power neither allows individual women to transcend domestic roles nor imaginatively defines female subjects as agents of their own destiny. Indeed, to the extent that Stowe herself and her sympathetic slave Eliza derive their cultural authority from a nineteenth-century maternal idealism, their newfound agency can only be legitimately deployed in service to a vulnerable other, whether that “other” be one’s own child or disenfranchised citizens, such as slaves. “[D]omestic self-denial and feminist self-seeking” cannot be as easily reconciled as Brown contends, although self-abnegation can easily go hand-in-hand with an active service on behalf of others. By imagining mothers as ideal female citizens who, drained of all self-interest and desire, reflexively focus on the needs of others, Stowe participates in a cultural project by which the mother, in Eva Cherniavsky’s words, becomes a “mediator of democratic social and political forms”—an effective (and affective) vehicle of a cohesive society in the face of the competing demands of the individual (42). While Stowe imagines Eliza and the other good mothers of her text as central to maintaining familial and, by extension, national bonds of union, the self-denying political agency of motherhood thus employed is purchased at the price of women’s personal agency. Individual, female subjectivity is subordina...